John Barnes and ESPN. The big question is why?

Just as the vagaries of the league and cup fixture lists occasionally conspire
to pit one team against another several times in a short period, there has
been an awful lot of John Barnes on our screens of late.

Here he is, tracing his Jamaican ancestors in Who Do You Think You Are? There he is, grinning and winking his way through an episode of All Star Mr and Mrs on ITV1. No, wait: he’s on ESPN, applying his expert eye to Manchester City v Swansea. No, there he is on the news, discussing racism in football.

Hang on, is that John Barnes on The X-factor? Is that John Barnes moderating the third US presidential debate? Is that John Barnes doing a 24-mile skydive from the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere? We’re still not sure.

The more cynical among you might suspect that Barnes has some sort of product out; an autobiography to flog, perhaps, or a live tour to promote.

But the truth is rather simpler. The product is Barnes himself. Since retiring from playing in 1999, Barnes has rather successfully (if, that is, you disregard an inadvertent – and swiftly overturned – bankruptcy three years ago) carved out a niche as a sort of one-man-John-Barnes-for-hire. The taxi is already on its way.

Whether it is the Strictly dance floor or the Channel 5 studio, Barnes will be there.

You may, for example, happen on some chance morsel of humour, such as the inadvertent chuckle let out by his wife Andrea on Mr and Mrs when Phillip Schofield raised the possibility that Barnes might be offered the England manager’s job.

In his own mind, Barnes remains the great unfulfilled managerial talent of his generation. His glower was fleeting, but genuine.

You will, if you ask, get to hear him rapping. “If you give me money,” he tells Schofield, “I will rap, and you will not get it back.” Schofield hands him a crisp £20 note, which Barnes pockets before embarking on what can only be described as around 15 seconds of pure, unadulterated, hell.

What you are more likely to get, however, is a sort of bullish, grinding competence that is utterly at odds with his mercurial career on the pitch.

Barnes is unlikely to turn the phrase of the year. He offers no greater insight than you could glean from a middle-ranking football blog. But he will reliably fill a silence for as long as you ask him to. He gets in, makes his ‘point’, and then gets out, often in the same taxi he arrived in.

“I’d always play Edin Dzeko,” he said before the Swansea game. “He’s fantastic. He and Agüero would be the front two, for me, every week.” As an opinion, it is nothing if not flawed. Dzeko’s bulk and immensely powerful shot render him perfectly suited to the late surge, the final fling, the injury-time penalty-box goalmouth scramble.

The point when Manchester City bring Dzeko on is analogous to the moment in a game of table football when you give up trying to thread the ball through the swiftly shifting gaps between the little plastic men, and begin violently spinning the bars in order to get a better strike. He is a big-hearted player with the unfortunate first touch of a Leyland DAF.

But it is, at least, an opinion: succinctly put and confidently delivered.

Its rightness or wrongness is immaterial. The salient point is that it is being delivered by John Barnes: Liverpool, England and Rangers legend. John Barnes of Strictly Come Dancing is saying a thing on the television.

That, in essence, is what you are paying for.

And that, in essence, is the major problem with ESPN. It still appears to regard its television channel as a space to be filled rather than a canvas to be painted.

Its choice of studio personnel — Barnes, Kevin Keegan, Craig Burley, Ray Stubbs — betrays no greater ambition than simply to be fairly competent. It is football handled with oven gloves.

Next season, it will lose the rights to Premier League football and Premiership rugby and will instead be forced to focus on its extensive portfolio of European football, American sport and cage-fighting. It seems as good a time as any to take a look in the mirror and work out what it is actually for.